Los Angeles speaks to me tonight. And I must transcribe. I have not done it for so long. I have let the city crumble all around me, and I have let my memories settle like so many scraps of torn love letters swept off a fourth floor balcony. I'm trying to piece them together now, over the hum of my dying laptop fan and Tom Waits growling about getting wasted and wounded in foreign places. Sometimes I think all my LA posts will involve Tom Waits,one way or the other.
It has been very long indeed, and fingers and prose get rusty if not utilized for washed away periods of existence. Drowned in work and realizations and not enough but just too much alcohol. My room is dimly lit.. and the streets outside, on the borders of South Central Los Angeles aren't that much better. I wonder who's walking past my door right now, and who eats at the lonely little taco stand somewhere along Jefferson between Budlong and Walton.. with its bright little bulbs burning deep into the badly lit night. I'm always listening to music. It's almost a compulsion really. Sometimes late at night I want to turn the music off and go outside and sit on the pavement, and pay close attention to the natural soundtrack of the LA nocturne. The constant wail of police sirens, and the whirl of helicopters overhead, and the odd solitary cyclist wheeling by, music blaring as loud as it possibly can within the output limitations of a little transistor radio strapped to his bicycle handlebars. The family tearing itself almost to pieces in the house next to mine only to reassemble themselves hastily the following morning, and the trumpet player practising somewhere a couple of houses down. Sometimes I feel like if I hear real close, strain my ears till they become elvish keen, let the night sink into me, and if, maybe, the helicopters would suspend themselves in air for a bit, and the police sirens moved off to a pretty part of town, I could, maybe, just maybe, hear the city decay and die ever so gently all around me. Hear the cracks grow bit by bit, feel the edifice of an elaborately constructed dream sink deep into the dust and sand from which it arose. South Central is not the centre of the dream, but it feeds into and from the dream machine, as everything in LA does. And it is here that the dream dies the hardest, and the mirror paths dye themselves tar-black.
So we arrive once more at Thomas Alan Waits. And how I learnt a new expression for drunkenness today, one of the more poetic ones I've come across. 'Four Sheets to the wind in Copenhagen' is about getting wasted. Like so many more of his songs. I don't really know who Tom Traubert is, but these are his Blues. And this is also universal. As the Blues usually is. So much of why we dig art is apocrypha and interpretation. We want to believe that this particular reason is why this song was written or we have our own idea of what that painting means or what that long panning shot in that film is supposed to signify, and it can be nothing else because then it would ruin the work of art for us. We project our own fantasies, and we use art vicariously as wish fulfilment. And Tom Traubert's Blues too has a few stories behind it, and maybe none of them are true, and perhaps all of them are. I'd like to think it's both, because reality is such a nebulous thing. I can convince myself of a lie and tell it to myself and to other people over and over and over till I start to believe it, and soon it is true. It is why I did something, it is why I wrote a poem, it is why I liked that girl for those five and a half minutes, the real reason gets lost, if there ever was one.
Idiomatic digression:
Two sheets to the wind is a colloquial expression denoting drunkenness. Three sheets has also been used. Waits took it a sheet further. 'Sheets' are the ropes used to control a ship's sails. So if the sheets are in the wind the ship is unsteady, misdirected, veering out of control, heading for a brutal hangover on Sunday morning with strange jagged memories and graffiti all over the mirror.
In my head I see snow and clean streets and very light-haired people. In my head I see Copenhagen. I imagine one night sometime in the mid 70s, and a young Tom Waits drunk and waltzing somewhere deep in the heart of Scandinavia. Waltzing with Mathilde, a violinist. Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, Matilda you'll go waltzing with me. I can't dance the waltz sober but the next time I'm drunk I will put on Leonard Cohen singing Lorca and I will waltz in perfect 3/4 time with my shadow, with my reflection, with all the empty clothes in my wardrobe and with whoever else is willing to waltz with me. But Vienna is another few images away. Tonight I am flitting through Copenhagen on the wings of vicarious inebriation, broken streets and soldiers and that certain kind of Zorba The Greek light that only cities by the harbour can have. I am bargaining with these Danish ghosts selling memories on the wayside and I am stumbling through cobbled streets thinking of poets. I think I throw up at some point. Is this Singapore? I suddenly find myself in Clark Quay, overlooking lights on the harbour. And this whole stream is a mess. Whose memories am I reliving. I remember that night, the bits I remember. I remember it more as a precursor to heartbreak. But I remember stumbling steps and the feeling that my stomach couldn't hold the secrets to the universe anymore. A plastic bag would have to do. I hear waltzes playing deep within a bar, while I am outside pouring my heart out onto the pavement. There's a bitter taste in my mouth that only cigarette smoke can cure.
I lost my flatcap somewhere near Skid Row on Halloween night this year. I was going to dance with a girl who had a boyfriend. Tom Traubert's Blues plays on loop. I'm letting my swirling memories settle for a bit. Singapore does that to me sometimes. Years and years ago it seems. Waits needed inspiration for his music, so he went to Skid Row, talked to the people there. Talked to the people whose stories he tells in his gravel-worn voice. He drank a pint of rye from a brown paper bag and puked his guts out somewhere between Main and Alameda. And he went home and wrote Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen slouched over his Steinway. "every guy down there... everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there." Myth and music freely intermingle in this city where it gets so hard to distinguish dreams from reality.
Nothing is ever lost I suppose. And everything is somehow expressed, even if we never write a word. Everyone's a part of everything, and the look those two lovers exchanged at the bar last night is the culmination of a thousand years of relationships and the starting point of a thousand more years. Copenhagen is more alien to me than Skid Row. And Skid Row is so very alien.
My friend and I are walking past The Falls, somewhere in Downtown LA, and this homeless lady is smoking the burnt out end of a cigarette. Of smoky days if I were to to be showoffy about my reading habits. And my friend gives her a cigarette (his name's Ash, coincidences just work that way) and is too depressed the rest of the night to have any 'fun'. To get drunk and talk to girls when there is a woman too out of it to tell if she's smoking a bit of charred paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment